If you’re used to shopping on Amazon regularly then you’ll be used to a homepage full of items you’ve already browsed, items inspired by your history and other recommended products based on your preferences and behaviour.

Forcing users to register their details before they checkout is one of the quickest ways to lower your conversion rate.

Once a customer is ready to buy something from your store, presenting them with page after page of forms in which they need to fill out the most unnecessary of personal details is a sure fire way to litter your site with abandoned baskets and disgruntled customers.

That’s why guest checkout is a must-have feature for almost every online retail experience.

As I mentioned in my best practice guide to guest checkouts having a guest checkout doesn’t necessarily mean losing out on valuable customer data, it means adopting practices that put the customer experience first.

Using guest checkout as the default option, then offering to ‘save the customer details’ after purchase can help lower cart abandonment.

Then along came Apple and its beautifully designed products that practically sold themselves with almost zero marketing effort.

What came next was a huge amount of mediocre products needing ever-increasing budgets in order to highlight differences and features that may not have existed in the first place.

User experience designer and CEO of Clearleft Andy Budd believes that product and marketing teams need to work closer together and that the relatively new field of User Experience Design is the glue to achieve that.

I spoke to Andy Budd about all matters relating to UX last week.

Andy Budd is also one of the speakers at Econsultancy's Festival of Marketing in November. Our two day celebration of the modern marketing industry also featuring speakers from LEGO, Tesco, Barclays, FT.com and more.

Are there any numbers out there to justify the hype? Let’s go on a little investigation.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, or in fact any publisher dealing in digital or marketing, you’ll likely be well versed in the world of beacons, iBeacons and other near-field communications (NFC).

If not, head on over to this handy beginner’s guide which should bring you up to speed.

Examples of beacons being used in everything from retail to one-off music or sporting events are becoming more frequent as the months roll on. It’s an exciting time, and there’s a genuine belief that this technology really will build the bridge between offline and online marketing.

The consensus seemed to be that experiences on the high street would be more important than mere commerce. Why go into a store if the journey of finding a product and taking it to the till to pay is as boring as it is online?

Over the past three years or so, I think we have seen the resurgence of the concept store. In fact, I think retail has woken up to the value of service, great product display, interactivity, digital technology and a great shopping experience.

Here, I've taken a look at some of the concept stores out there, and what they mean for customer experience.

Sales of Macs hit 4.8m in Q1 2014, up from 4.1m for the same holiday period in 2013. OS X has a big impact on the conventions of UI and UX.

The feature I saw the most buzz about on social is the improved Spotlight. The feature has a new search window and a rich, scrollable preview of results that finds stuff on your Mac but now also Wikipedia, Bing, Maps, and other sources.

This is the latest reminder of how powerful search is and how consumers increasingly rely on it across technology and the web.

As a relative newcomer to the digital marketing world, I've decided to write a series of 'beginner's guides' to uncover what is meant by certain terms, trends and technological advances in digital; being both a travel guide and a personal investigation.

Here I’ll be answering the following questions: What are iBeacons? What are their practical applications? Are iBeacons better than similar existing technology?

All this in a tone of voice that has been described as both 'helpful' and 'not too rambling'.

Just a cursory glance around the internet and indeed our own blog, throws up a lot of phrases and acronyms surrounding the term iBeacons (NFC, BLE… iBeacons).

Let’s have a little wade through the jargon. Bear with me, I’ll try and do this as logically as possible.